Four

Tomorrow you turn four. Four years sounds very serious. Not quite serious enough for school, but not frivolous like a three year old. My mother, your Nana, always tells me about how she and my father walked around the rose garden the morning I was born. And then I arrived with a holler at 3.20pm, in time for afternoon tea. Before you were born I would roll my eyes and groan something teenage-y whenever I heard this story; oh Mum, you're embarassing me. But I get it now. I get it because every year on the 4th of February I do the same thing. I tell you about how your dad and I went and had a last supper, well, it was lunch, at Ernesto's. We ate hash browns and eggs and hollandaise. I went to the chemist and bought the last of the supplies I thought I would need to look after a little baby. We went home and packed those few last things in my red suitcase, which is now your suitcase, and then at 5pm we went to the hospital. It was a dull overcast day, a little windy. As we came down the hill to Newtown, Christy Moore was playing on the stereo, a song I'd been teasing your dad about. I asked him how he felt. Scared, he said. When we got the hospital, your dad took photos of me beside the sign at the hospital, with my suitcase and my bump where you were. I knew I wouldn't have the bump next time I stood in the carpark. The same Christy Moore song was on the stereo when we brought you home two days later.

So it's six hours until you are four. Tomorrow when you wake up you'll come into your mum and dad's room and clamber in between us. There will most probably be a tickle fight. I will look at you and see every day since the day you were born, and when you're five, I'll get nostalgic about it.